It's a shame this happened again, but not enough of a shame that we'll try to prevent another.
Of course South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley isn't interested in changing any part of the state's gun laws in the aftermath of this latest in our unending stream of mass murders. The nation's leaders didn't give a damn when a man walked into an elementary school and murdered two classrooms full of kids, you're not going to get a Southern governor to give even half a damn over nine black Americans
executed in their South Carolina church.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) on Friday morning said that, following the deadly shooting at a Charleston church on Wednesday, the state should focus on the suspect, not gun laws. [...]
"Any time there’s a traumatic situation, people want something to blame. They always want something to go after," Haley responded on "The Today Show." "There is one person to blame here, a person filled with hate, a person that does not define South Carolina, and we are going to focus on that one person.”
The "one person" in this case was prohibited from purchasing a firearm because
he was awaiting trial on a previous felony charge. So his dad bought one for him. (Respect the culture, and so on—still haven't heard from pa, by the way.) And no, even polls showing a majority of South Carolina residents support
tougher gun laws doesn't give her pause.
You can see where Gov. Haley is coming from. The potential need to execute large numbers of black Americans is, after all, one of the dominant reasons America enshrined broad gun protections at a Constitutional level; when yet another race-obsessed domestic terrorist murders the occupants of yet another important black church the current gun laws are, as many are quick to point out, still working exactly as intended. No change needed here. And when the state of South Carolina flies the Confederate flag on capitol grounds, it is flying the flag that presided over a century of lynchings, church bombings, and summary executions of black Americans who were attempting to rise above what Southern "heritage" prescribed for them even 100 years after the Civil War was over. It flies again today over another set of murders by another pro-segregation terrorist, just as it was designed to do.